WHAT BIRD IS THAT?

Apparently oblivious to the significance of form in identifying species, an American student interning at the British Museum is said to have put the label “Trumpeter Swan” on a 1585 watercolor John White painted in Virginia on one of the early expeditions to what became colonial America.

This, despite the fact that Kim Sloan, curator of the John White Collection at the British Museum, had already pointed out that the bird in question had a knob, which is characteristic of the Mute Swan. Neither the Trumpeter nor the Tundra Swans have knobs. A 1960s identification of this same painting by University of North Carolina staff was apparently also mistaken as Trumpeter Swan because the bill color was black. Sloan pointed out that 16^th Century watercolor pigments included lead, which often turns the original colors black. So, beware of identifications.

We easily overlook that we have been imprinted by Roger Tory Peterson’s 1934 interpretive methods in A Field Guide to the Birds, now in a 4^th edition (1980). Peterson focused all diagnosis on the “field mark.”  This was a useful methodological trick he learned from an illustration in Two Little Savages, a book by Ernest Thompson Seton who taught a prior generation about Nature. But Peterson copyrighted the field mark, and dominated the field as Seton never could.

Field marks are handy, especially for people in a hurry, like Americans. But people learned to identify birds for themselves long before Peterson provided that short-cut.  A plate of bird drawings in the French dictionary, Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustre (p.715 in the 1938 edition), shows lovely illustrations, including a Mute Swan without a knob. The artist apparently simply considered this an unnecessary detail in a plate that would in any event be greatly reduced for reproduction.

Problems of misidentification have been rampant. In the 1930s George J. Wallace planned a life-history of Bicknell’s Thrush, a bird restricted to the mountain tops of the Northeast U. S. and adjacent Canada.  To his dismay, he found that a significant fraction of the specimens in museum collections had been misidentified, even though originally collected by the experts of the day. That frustrating experience gave us a delightful little book on bird taxonomy instead of a life history.

Likewise, in browsing through the bird skin collections of the Department of Ornithology at Cornell University a few years ago, Kenneth Parkes, a former student there who had meanwhile become the distinguished curator of birds at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, made a surprising discovery. He saw that a specimen labeled immature Bonaparte’s Gull was actually an immature Little Gull, a European vagrant. Almost embarrassing was the fact that the bird had been taken on Cayuga Lake by three of the most notable bird students of their day:  Arthur A. Allen, the first full-time professor of ornithology in America; Louis Agassiz Fuertes, the greatest bird  portraitist of early 20^th Century; and Ludlow Griscom, one of Allen’s first graduate students at Cornell who later showed all of us how to identify birds without shooting them, the same man Roger Peterson would call the court of last recourse in bird identification.

A more recent conundrum in bird identification is of course that of  the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the Arkansas River bottoms of the old Mississippi River Embayment. In 2004, after fifty years without confirmed reports of this great bird, two supposed sightings initiated highly-publicized, large-scale field investigations in order to at last confirm the presumed persistence of a pair or more of these woodpeckers. If the birds had indeed survived all these years, they would warrant a massive conservation effort to ensure continued well-being.  But two full seasons of field work by scores of competent searchers uncovered nothing, so the effort sputtered.

It is perhaps inevitable that with increasing public interest in any human activity, there will be an increase in questionable testimony and commentary in that field. Ready or not, people like to have a say in things. Especially will this be so where funding may be available to pursue the pros and cons. In such a broader context, questions of bird identification are mere examples of  a process. The problem becomes truly complex and stubborn when premature assumptions involve social attitudes..

In late 20^th Century, the growing urban population in advanced societies, now eager to demonstrate a concern for “the environment” which events increasingly posed as threat, sprouted a phobia, “the threat of invasive species.”  Scientists had of course been complaining about aspects of this problem for several decades. The threat is meaningful, but the public phobia is mostly based on naïve perception.

All three of planet Earth’s dominant civilizations—Chinese, Indian, and Western—have overpopulated their worlds, and thereby dramatically disrupted the evolutionary communities of  all the climatic regions. Although long neglected and discounted, there is now no escaping the fact that  most plant and animal populations—except that of humans  and a few adventives---are in drastic decline. This means that our take-over of  the environment to nurture our swollen billions has already eliminated a significant fraction of  the larger organisms produced by evolutionary experimentation. The survival prospects  for what remains are dire, and there is little alternative to being dubious about our ability to alter that march of events we set in motion, especially some 10,000 years ago, but more specifically 500 years ago in Europe. This, of course, is when we invented that economic system based on endless accumulation which we call Capitalism.

Invasive Species, so-called, are the “less desirable” or “out of place” plants and animals that come to compete unfavorably with the familiar, and therefore preferred-because-adapted-to, prior aggregations we call life communities. Although modern instruments currently enable us to contend over the complexities of these evolutionary processes, most species emerge because units of existing populations become isolated enough to allow the differential accumulation of  genetic changes. Such changes, whether physical or psychological, often suffice to prevent interbreeding. For the last century, this geographical isolation of population segments has been our criterion of what constitutes a biological species. At the level of micro-organisms, such invasions are often considered no more than infections.

Until “just now” we have been oblivious to the fact that our inveterate mania for road-building, mostly to provide access to resources of one kind or another, has so modified the continents that we have destroyed much of the spatial isolation that enabled species to form and persist in the first place. We have homogenized habitats, to the fatal disadvantage of  habitat specialists, and the dismaying advantage of  those generalist species we call unfriendly invasives. Besides, especially since the Age of  Exploration in the 16^th Century, but the more so the more mobile we are, we have moved species around, willy-nilly, and set the stage for the massive era of invasives we now complain about.

Finally, it seems likely that our unsophisticated  concern about invasive species has redounded to a focused abuse of  one bird species in particular, the Mute Swan. In the 1930s, someone doing field studies in Rhode Island, rediscovered the obvious fact that a species new to the area tends to compete for food and space with prior residents. The Mute Swan was expanding its Long Island Sound populations at the time. A decade or two later, the state wildlife commissioners of that Northeast region became concerned about this intrusion into new territory, and recommended that the swan’s numbers be stabilized before it got out of hand. This seemed reasonable, and several States agreed to limit their swan populations to a number they felt acceptable, especially in view of the fact that the general public values this swan as one of the few large birds that can be approached. The same public should of course be taught that so large a bird will likely be insistent on its “personal space,” and might be dangerous if its territory is foolishly invaded.

A few State wildlife agencies, or even staff acting individually, unfortunately went to extremes and announced that the Mute Swan must be extirpated. This was notable in Maryland and Connecticut. That some groups had different agendas in mind became plain when, about 2005, it became known that they really wanted to eliminate Mute Swans in order to introduce Trumpeter Swans from the northwestern U.S. This was a bird they considered “nobler” in bearing, and thus a better trophy bird for the drastically declining hunting clan that heretofore provided local license fees for State budgets, and political support. But this looked like swapping one “invasive” species for another. It certainly elided the fact that waterfowlers who valued the “split rail traditions” of their sport had long refused to shoot “flying pup tents,” as they called Mute Swans.

It also elided the fact that native species, like ducks, said to be disadvantaged by the Mute Swan’s “competition,” have mostly been victims of dispossession by agriculture on their breeding grounds, and may soon be further decimated by drought.

The process became nasty when two ladies joined forces to challenge the lack of “due process” in permitting this carnage. They sued the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service.  And they twice won in court!  So the old-boy network circumvented the need to tell us what is really going on by getting a collusive Congressman to help change the law. The trick is well-known. Simply add an addendum, surreptitiously, to some complicated bill that has already passed muster. No discussion necessary.

Perhaps the real tragedy of this debacle lies in the public confusion being generated. A full century of  public education about the importance of conserving wildlife may be at stake  The irrationality of the present campaign against the Mute Swan is grotesquely illustrated by the demonization perpetrated  against this bird by none other than the National Wildlife Federation’s long-admired magazine for children, Ranger Rick.  An illustration whose demonic imagery appeared in a 2007 issue of Ranger Rick, is testimony to this strange credo.